Makeness

I have to think up a more accurate word for what is called filmmaking - because it's not film and it's not really making. It's taping and wangling. Tapewangling.

I'm not attracted to tapewangling.

But filmmaking is really more of a handicraft like sewing or knitting, more and more. As the tools of that medium become regarded for their historical, symbolic value it feels like we can choose to live in a made world or theoretical arranged world - or both.

The other day I was helping a shop owner move her inventory of stuff to a new location. She deals in objects that are valued for their historical properties but also for their de-valued properties. Labels, cigar bands, letraset, keys, test tubes, dye cut paper, foil, ink stamps, wrapping paper, parts, doodads, yarn, matchbooks - tonnes and tonnes of this stuff, up to rafters. They are all tangible: old, process printed, inked relics, disintegrating. They are the objects that pack the corners in uneasy dreams. The stuff dreams are made of I suppose. Print is disintegrating, film is decomposing, digital media is not here for the long haul. But the disintegration is still tangible as particles that have the weight of their history embedded in them.

I have an uneasy label under my name on my website. I've given myself the tag of illustrator and filmmaker because I was taking a course in self employment. Everyone in the class had to be a noun who verbs. So anyway, the site is odd. I make slippers. I sew things. I write things and look at art. I enthuse about art. I pine for the experience of making-ness. Kids live in a made world. They handle beads and wires and wool. In an hour they have produced a toy or a gift and they've made themselves a history. What about all the hours of experience of making that occurs for the event of tapewangling? Where do those memories go? I feel that they are storehoused white elephants.